AFAIK they will bring it at least partway up the mountain, but they'll certainly stop at every interesting bit along the way. The rover is there to look at the interesting bits, climbing the mountain is just a way to get to some of them.

If it takes 900 images to make a 1 000 000 000 pixel image, that means it's a, wait for it, a 1.1 mega pixel camera!! While these numbers aren't exact they're in the ball park

Might as well go for the actual numbers, right? The original image is 1.3 billion pixels, not exactly 1 billion. The MastCam (2 cameras) can take true-color still pictures at 1600x1200, just below 2 million pixels. It can also take video at 10fps at 1280x720 (720p). There's another camera, the Mars Hand Lens Imager, which also takes 1600x1200 pictures but is meant for closeups, it has a focal length between 18 - 21 mm and can zoom up to 14.5 micrometers per pixel. The descent imager is also 1600x1200, but its job is done. There are 13 other cameras at lower resolution. The rover has far and away the best camera suite we've dropped on to Mars.

So please don't go thinking it's one picture taken by a camera that has a 1 giga pixel sensor on it.

Don't worry, anyone who got to the second sentence in the summary knows that.

Not impressed by a 1-2 MP camera? Well: it was tested and developed for about 5 years before getting on the rover, which means it didn't get further in the chip development road.

Industry graded cameras are still in the VGA-5 MP range. Check out companies like ISVI, AVT, PointGrey, Basler. Only specialized companies offer sensors like 29MP full frame chips. The grunt work is done in low megapixels.

Odd. I thought I'd react with more excitement to decent photos from another world. For some reason there's really not a lot of sense of wonder there. Maybe if that other world were a somewhat more interesting tourist destination...

Correct, but incomplete -- By 1976 (only 19 years after Sputnik 1) we had two nuclear powered, robot laboratories (Vikings 1 and 2) on Mars looking for life and signs of life and taking awesome pictures. So now it is 37 years later and we have Curiosity, a nuclear powered, robot laboratory looking for signs of life and taking awesome pictures, which can move around on Mars. The leap from Sputnik to Viking sure seems to be a lot more than that from Viking to Curiosity. Not to dismiss the awesomeness of Cu